“In view of all this, what theory can you offer me that will explain this moment when once common bedfellows find themselves estranged? What happens when we grope within the void and find that our bogies no longer coincide? Can you tell me earnestly that Derrida or even Hall can unravel the absurdity and complexity of this reality? Is there a way to deconstruct pain? Because, I recognize that issues of culture and conflict are ones that I need to resolve personally and professionally before I can begin to articulate them philosophically…the question is do you?”1
Last semester, in a paper offered for the SOCHUM’s Graduate Workshop, I voiced a series of questions that had come out of my time here. They were as much a challenge to myself as they were to the audience, and combined with an on going prodding of my conscience (and others) in seminars, they marked a certain frustration that I had been experiencing in my work. For some time, I have been searching for a better fit between the problems of black reality and the theoretical tools we use for its analysis. Because of my commitment to keeping my work relevant to people in the Caribbean, I am constantly questioning how I can help others articulate their realities, if I can’t get my head around theoretical texts without feeling some level of inadequacy? Having posed such questions, I think it is important for me to try to address them, through my own research.
This paper discusses my current studies around the theme of black magic. This research is not, as some have supposed, and the dictionary suggests, an exploration of “magic attempted for evil purposes, calling upon evil spirits or the Devil.”2 Neither does it focus on ‘voodoo’ or some other black spiritual experience. Rather, my reading of Black Magic is to do with links between European and African diaspora thought structures as applied to Western art history and as such it brings a new and different meaning to the term Black Magic with little historical precedent. It is a theoretical approach and collective title for a series of essays that discuss the relationship between two cultures; their shared superstitions and imagery.
The working title for this series of essays is Black Magic: Representing Race from Ra to Rastafari. And whereas the term black magic, might reflect its European arcane and medieval origins, its relationship to other issues of representation, race and the study of black visual history invites a leap into subject matter that is less known. This sense of a quest to explore the unfamiliar is deliberately provoked by the term black itself that has historically been linked with darkness and mystery. The abracadabra type leap that the reader/viewer makes from notions of magic to black culture is one that Black Magic will explore even as it is challenged. In this way, I hope that the title aptly reflects the process involved in recovering and piecing together secrets of a hidden history. The method is intended to be magical moving from the known to the unknown like a magician summoning up images from the dark.
My starting point is Jamaican Art and in particular those artists linked to the Rastafari movement who paint with mysterious signs, symbols and colours that typify their beliefs. But already, exploring the development of this art form has mapped out a journey that includes the art of Ancient Egypt; the richly descriptive narratives of black people in the Bible; icons of Ethiopia; depictions of black people related to magic and medieval history (especially freemason thought); renaissance and enlightenment representations of blackness and the ‘noble savage’ compared to the demoralizing and racialising images of slavery, as well as the more surreal forms of modern art’s responses to Africa that have been synthesized into an afro-Caribbean worldview. With so many pathways to pursue, I hope this title Black Magic: Representing Race from Ra to Rastafari evokes the sense of adventure that I feel about this journey, its speculative nature and its personal uncertainties.
Falling between an interest in European magical beliefs and African diaspora responses to those beliefs, Black Magic is research that seems to genuinely perplex those who are unwilling to blur the lines between two cultural phenomena that historically share the same nomenclature. There is wariness about exploring what might exist at the etymological and aesthetic roots of Black Magic for fear of discovering its links to race, prejudice and the occult. But this interrogation of its ambiguities and any self-recognition that might result is an important aspect of Black Magic. Its theory can be understood from a perspective that can be both European and African. Black Magic’s resonance within both white and black culture is the key to its appropriateness.3 Discussion about Europe’s relationship with Africa requires a language that can articulate an experience in which both races are implicated, and in which both cultures are equally complicit or equally powerful.
Black Magic attempts this conversation using expressions that are open to negotiation and re-interpretation. It tries to re-appropriate and invert the term black magic to question how blackness works as a negative signifier and what impact that relationship has had on representations of black people historically. What does it mean for black people to have been burdened by a descriptor that aligns them with foul play, tragedy, discredit, and necromancy, and what is at stake by their inclusion in artwork, and their association with superstition and magic?4 In this research these historical and visual relations are explored through theoretical questioning of the term black magic itself. By considering why the term’s re-appropriation is necessary as well as any resulting insights or shifts in perspective, this position paper underpins a larger body of work that might optimistically, contribute to contemporary thinking within black visual studies.
From biblical depictions of Ham5 through to the dark satyrs Greek myth6 and the dusky maids of Modernism7, black people have been sexualized and demonized throughout western art history. The presence of black people in art has been rarely benign, and their images carry symbolism that range from the decorative to the demonic, to signify difference. The theory behind Black Magic however, is not intended merely as a tool for rescuing the vilified black image, rather it is used as a way of critiquing historical perspectives about race and representation that are deeply embedded within western culture and a way of re-orienting our vision. By exploring a range of images from art history, this study hopes to recuperate the black image while at the same time provoke critiques of a culture that still fails to examine its own processes of representation. Through an examination of demonized black (and sometimes white) images it is possible to see that such methods of representation are a visual articulation of fears as yet unspoken to do with superstition and the unknown. These images signify to black people not only an understanding of white anxiety towards them but also how they might empower themselves through an inversion of that same anxiety, fear, shame and guilt.
The adoption of the term black as a descriptor of race in the 1960s was a conscious strategy to challenge those fears and to invert the centuries old spell, cast on that colour. The black arts movement of that era, including the spiritual and political imagery of Rastafari has irrevocably altered and reversed the complexion of blackness by embracing the void; the abyss of Abbysinia. This in itself is a kind of magic where the demonized ‘other’ recognizes a fissure in the philosopher’s stone and uses it as a tool for conjuring up a new space and place of visibility in history. It is this place of unrecognized reciprocity, this interstice of the conjurer and the conjured, that constitutes the magic, that (for good, or ill), is the subject of this paper.
This reconsideration of words such as Black Magic that interrogate and posit ideas beyond dictionary definitions and traditional binary oppositions has played an important role in cultural studies since the advent of post-modernism. Edward Said’s seminal work of the 1970s Orientalism is perhaps the best-known study that challenges European discourse using a deconstructive approach derived from Derrida8 But even before this, black thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1920s, and the negritude poets of the 1950s, talked about ‘double consciousness’ and ideas such as ‘negritude’ to critique western discourse in a manner that was deconstructive using puns, word play and ambiguities of language. As the black literature theorist Glyne Griffith has stated, these approaches can be seen as ontological strategies, “long employed by empire’s “invisible” to interrogate imperialism’s facile oppositions of “visible” and “invisible”, master and slave and “civilized” and “uncivilized”9. Rastafari expression and its ‘I and I’ consciousness, whereby the inherent biases of the English language are exposed and reconfigured, is a perfect example of this use of double entendre.
In my own methodoly, this is a strategy I have engaged in the past, as a way of exposing the binaries inherent in European art. My earlier work Negrophilia was provocatively titled using a controversial French expression literally meaning ‘the love of black’ to question the relationship between European avant-garde artists and black culture in 1920s Paris. It demonstrated that the visual study of the West’s relationships with its others is a study about supremacy, and competition, but ultimately about fear, self-avoidance and self-loathing.10 It viewed the West’s construction of a ‘primitive’ type as a projection, an attempt to dispel and displace its own anxieties.11 In Negrophilia, the ‘primitive’ is seen as fictional, created to be oppositional to, or to complement the western rational ‘I’, and the verb ‘to primitivise’ is employed to suggest an active process that negates nouns such as the ‘primitive’ and ‘primitivism’ that carry fictitious and eurocentric biases. Black Magic works in the same way calling for western reflexivity and self-reflection.
This need to actively re-appropriate language seems necessary now as black scholars begin to enjoy greater status within the Academy and as they begin to require and develop a more rigorous ways of articulating their own cultural experiences and world view. There is a limit to the extent that Freud’s Oedipal theories or Foucault’s essays on punishment for example, can be used fully to elucidate the lived black experience. It even seems likely that much of that lived experience offers a greater incite into discourses of power and its relations. Such insights might be lost to this research if it relied only on a formulaic application of these ideas.12
So much of black people’s experience since their abduction via slavery and since they began that trans-Atlantic journey through painful waters and were forced to forge a peculiar marriage with the West, is idiosyncratic and theoretically uncharted. We are emerging from a history of silence at once the result of social repression (being banned from our language, literature and spirituality), and also the product of cultural crisis involving separation from tribes, families and individuals in a way that has arrested our development as people and traumatized our collective memory.
So, how is it possible to tell this story and to consider it theoretically when we are bereft of words to speak about these experiences?
By default, that narrative must come from our repressed memory; flashes from an interior place of anger and loss. There is a sense of grasping for images and language, or groping in what Benitez Rojo describes as ‘the black hole of plantation experience’ to articulate the unspoken, and to bring something into being.13 Black Magic is an attempt to review this history using the only images and history, available to us (whether European or African) but to recognize within this imagery, the probability of bias and the possibility of inverting and articulating that bias in a way that will promote a new narrative about blackness.
How to proceed with this conversation presents challenges and the necessity of sometimes stepping outside the polite and rational norms of European discourse. For instance, that discourse suggests that pain is a bias that undermines criticism and is thus inadmissible. But since this conversation is about the pain of invisibility, to choose objectivity alone negates the very substance of that exchange. With this in mind, I choose to speak with another voice, a voice that gives equal authority to my gut as much as my head: a voice that expresses frustration, anger, disappointment, wanting and many other feelings regularly negated by history. I choose to speak clearly in whatever manner or fashion it takes to explore more fully the missing links between two cultures and the historically ambivalent, on again, off again, relationship between blacks and whites. In addition to my art historical authorial voice, the model I choose is that of the ‘griot’, the west African story-teller who is obliged to recount the past in a way that uses history, experience, wisdom and theory to educate and even sometimes to moralize.14 Within this narrative, tales of myth and magic, fact and fiction, prose and poetry are all admissible to the end of arriving at truth. Within this narrative Toni Morrison’s symbolism, Malcolm X’s rhetoric or Tupak’s rap is given equal weight alongside Fanon’s psychoanalysis or Homi Bhaba’s theories, to the end of arriving at truth. In this way, I hope that I can open up a discussion about visual history that will engage a reciprocal way of seeing and articulating. In this sense, the narrative I offer is not about judgment, but rather an invitation to understand another way of seeing.
This lack of hierarchy or use of scholarly historical precedents is also a way of claiming possibilities for black theorists who enter into this process of reclamation. Like scavengers, it is necessary to revisit history searching and sifting through the archeological knowledge structures of the past to dust off and rediscover aspects of black thought and civilisation distorted by time. Scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop,15 Yosef ben Jochannan16 and Martin Bernal17 have already pioneered this process of excavation. But there is also recourse to invention. The great European thinkers of our time such as Derrida, Freud et al., thought themselves into being, not by mimicry but by virtue of their originality. As an independent black female scholar, I reserve the right to articulate my world in a way that is different. I consciously, but also respectfully choose not to model my research around dominant theoretical discourse.
Black literary theorist Hortense Spillers discusses a similar need for a different approach to theory, she situates her thinking closer to Lacan and suggests ways that his ideas about interiority might be reconfigured to explore what is different about black social formation in a way that is politically responsive and responsible. Talking about the use of a Lacanian approach to black theory, she states:
“For me, the psychoanalytic offers a discourse that opens up that possibility, which looks back towards something that I have nostalgia for; lost childhood; lost youth and the values associated with that, and forward where I am now and where I think I have to go. It seems to be that there’s a possibility that psychoanalytic discourse, will be transformed, if you can get it into the arena in a certain kind of way which is going to alter it; once you move it out of its own historical context, you’ve got to change that configuration, too. So what you’re going to effect a change on both sides of the equation. You’re going to change what’s possible to talk about in your own social formation just as you’re going to change what you think is a “lever” that pries the issue open.”18
There is much of value in Spiller’s thinking that gives priority to what she calls ‘interior intersubjectivity’ that allows for a more psychoanalytical approach to theorizing the black experience, particularly that of the black diaspora. It seems negligent that the theories we currently use to consider black existence do not explore sufficiently the psychological effects that forced migration, cultural dislocation and modernity have had on our identities both collective and individual. Spiller’s idea that we must all become ‘culture workers’ turning our attention inwards suggests an exploration of the self that goes beyond our present conventional and clinical understanding of psychoanalysis. Instead, it opens up an inquiry that points beyond a pathological understanding off race, to ask more general and perfectly reasonable questions as to what it means to be racially defined in the 21st century. Culture work then becomes a process that any one of us can undertake to better understand our place in history, in society and our present day relations with others. Culture work becomes something that white as well as black people can undertake to understand how our thought and knowledge structures function to reinforce or undermine our constructions of identity. In this regard, one does not need to be a psychiatrist or even a theorist to understand or undertake this kind of self and social examination of racial behaviour.
Looking at images via art history has proven to be an important tool for enabling discussions about human nature and this kind of culture work. An artist’s ability to capture time, place and layers of meaning within a work, allows that imagery to stand independently as important historical documents. Unlike a literary or oral tradition, there is something both accessible and irrevocable about the image that presents the contemporary viewer with a picture of a particular moment and sentiment that is often undeniable. It is also possible in reviewing these images over centuries to see that when it comes to human behaviour, history loops and repeats itself. Little ever changes. When these patterns of existence relate to race, viewers can position themselves in relation to an historical moment, its ideology and prejudices in a way that is engaging and very present. It requires a process of bending backwards; opening oneself up to the past even as one is rooted in the present. This connection of past and present then becomes and important tool for what Spillers might include in her understanding of ‘ethical-self knowing’ and a better understanding of ourselves in relation to ‘others’.19
Black Magic represents the defining moment when normally estranged ‘others’ recognize their inter-relatedness. It is an understanding of how we change and transform as we encounter, engage, rub up against, grapple and even enter into conflict with each other. Within that process, and even by virtue of that process, something is always exchanged. We change and are altered through our interaction. Whether that alterity is good or bad is neither here nor there, in fact, there can be no judgment placed on that exchange more than to recognize its event.
This approach is very much keeping with recent theories of creolisation emerging from a Caribbean context.20 These theories, rather like Said’s discussions on impurity21, recognize that hybridity, and intermixture are a part of the lived colonial legacy and our sense of modernity, especially within the diaspora. There is an acknowledgement of the reciprocity involved in European culture’s engagement with black culture; it is not a ‘one way street’. Rather, European culture is as much impacted by its interactions within the diaspora, as is black culture.22 The exchange becomes fluid, dynamic, and even grudgingly generous in relation to each other. Black Magic with its contemporary manifestations in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santeria, Jamaican Obeah and now Rastafari (to name only a handful of the regions spiritual offerings) all form part of the region’s response to Western spiritual superstitions, enlightenment values and rationalism. They come together in a way that recent Caribbean theory has envisioned as a kind of melting pot. Like a fine rum, or a good ‘Saturday soup’ that we in the Caribbean call a callaloo or a pepperpot, but that might resonate more readily in the European imaginary as a witches cauldron, we can create a blend of ideas, or a magical potion that brings something else into existence.23 As Benitez-Rojo aptly observes in tracing the origins and conflation of imagery and spiritual concepts that comprise the Cuban cult of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre.
“The cult of the Virgin de la Caridad del Cobre can be read as a Cuban cult, but it can also be reread–one reading does not negate the other–as a meta-archipelagic text, a meeting or confluence of marine flowings that connects the Niger with the Mississippi, the China Sea with the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo”24
Black Magic comes out of the need for terms that can be considered reflexive, that allow the possibility of navigating between cultures, a term that acknowledges both Benitez Rojo’s creolised Caribbean25 or Paul Gilroy’s black modernity.26 In both their theories water, whether as the Caribbean Sea or Atlantic Ocean play an important role in defining black culture. Both scholars recognize how this water connects as much as it separates colonial cultures and how its fluidity has allowed black people to move almost poetically from one space to another. Building on their theories, Black Magic takes this understanding of place even further linking not just geographical space but also temporal space. Collapsing time, Black Magic represents this notion of mediation between two continents of experience, between the old and the new world across the arc of history, like a bridge. This act of arching backwards allows one to view the past from a present day perspective, to bring an understanding of the arc of magic’s history to our understanding of the self, be it black or white.
So let’s discuss that history within a contemporary theoretical framework.
Although ‘ magic’ is a fairly neutral term from the Persian word magus referring to astrologer priests of ancient Medes, it took on pagan connotations amongst the Old Testament Israelites and later Christians, when practitioners of other religions were accused of exercising powers that derived from a source other than one true God.
Christianity, itself nurtured in the mystical cultures of the Nile Valley was originally one of these many competing cults characterized by its magical practices including Christ’s miracles, spontaneous healing, and later, its Mass rumored to involve blood sacrifice. The young church under Roman rule frowned on magical feats they were considered foreign imported practices, however there was also a general understanding that it’s own practices were performed for a higher good and were sanctified. All this meant that many of the church’s earliest concerns centered around guiding its new membership on careful use of spiritual practices. A distinction was made between high and low forms of magic and adherents could be punished for abuses, particularly those guided by scriptures that had been marginalized such as the Apocrypha. As Richard Cavendish recounting the history of magic explains:
“It was not to be imagined that a man could work wonders by himself. If he was not a saint, whose miracles were performed by God, then his marvels must be worked by Satan and his legions of fiends, and he must be in league with them. This was believed to mean that, explicitly or implicitly, he had made a pact of allegiance with them, abandoning his faith, renouncing his baptism and with it his Christian identity, and signing his soul away to the Devil. Stories about people who had done this began to circulate widely from the sixth century onwards. The consequence was that any form of magic of which the Church disapproved, even if it was beneficent in intention, carried with it a dangerous stigma of trafficking with demons…”27
During the Middle Ages, this censure was further underscored by the prefix ‘black’ at a time when blackness was equated with the darkness of the underworld, a negative space of hellish proportions, inhabited by Satan and his legion of demons. Black magic was defined in opposition to white magic and spiritual practices used by Christians to effect good and to protect the holy realm. Signifiers of that realm were envisioned in terms of light, white, and purity and were directly related to the church and its dominions. Blackness came to depict that which operated outside these boundaries, the great unknown. It was a signifier of spatial and spiritual distance.
It is not difficult to see how this process of exclusion could later be applied to any ‘other’ that posed a threat to the reputation and practice of the Church. In their turn, Jews, Muslims, Mongols, Asians were all considered heretics, sinners, and satyrs.28 As nations such as the Portugal and the Spain came into contact with other cultures of Africa and the New World, their difference had to be accommodated within Christian theology and its limited worldview. In fact, the term fetish was a pigeon expression shared between Africans and European traders describing the ritual objects they exchanged and the fear that Europeans experienced when they encountered them. Africans were viewed as heathens and savages and their belief in spirits was naturally labeled as devil worship.29
In its choice of theme Black Magic runs the risk of being ‘tarred with the same brush’ and of perpetuating stereotypes of black culture related to spirituality and notions of European primitivism that can no longer be considered appropriate in the 21st century. Within the arts, as in the area of critical theory, we have witnessed a number of publications and exhibitions that have attempted to redress this imbalance between the West and the rest of the world. The three most significant ventures in this regard are the Menil Foundation’s publication, The Image of the Black in Western Art30, the Museum of Modern Arts Primitivism: Affinities of the Tribal and Modern held in 1994 31 and Paris’ Centre Pompidou exhibition Magiciens de la Terre of 1989. 32 As part of the fallout, Black Magic might be labeled also as hegemonic and nativising, unless it can suggest something different about our understanding of European superstition, magic and blackness as well as black culture’s response to it.
In the face of such challenges, this study redefines European black magic as a form of negrophobia; literally a fear of blackness, or a fear of the unknown that has been cast on black people like a shadow. The experience of blackness, for white people represents a negation of self, an acknowledgement of one’s separateness and estrangement. Absence of light, the night, darkness and death all reinforce this sense of alienation and the prospect of unknowability. From a psychological perspective, it is not difficult to see how black people, as a distant and dark skinned other, externalized these qualities of the unknown. As the anti-thesis of the white self they would be the bearers of all that was apposite and feared. The race on to which, white superstition could be projected.
It would be naïve to believe that black people were not aware of European fear and antipathy towards them, or that they too did not suffer from their own type of negrophobia having been exposed to the same history of degradation. The vagaries of their relationship with the West had shifted throughout history according to the degree of paranoia Europe experienced about its own existence. Whereas during the pre-Hellenic period one sees depictions of black people living fairly innocuously alongside whites in societies that border on being almost cosmopolitan, throughout western art history and with the development of Christian devotional imagery that relationship shifts from negrophilia to negrophobia according to Europe’s need for objects of affection or for scapegoats. In fact, it is not surprising that the term scapegoat of Jewish origin, referring to the Day of Atonement when a goat was sent into the wilderness bearing the sins of that race, in Western art history would be depicted as an anthropomorphized black goat-man Baphomet characterizing the Devil. Similar links between thought and visual representation are evidenced in both European and African cultures and all related to black culture’s response to Europe’s racial ambivalence.
So, Black Magic in relation to these black cultural responses, is not about spirituality per se, but about the pragmatics of survival. This Black Magic has more to do with West African tales of Anansi or Caribbean ‘ginnalship’: ways of being created by black people to usurp and seize power from their masters under colonization. It is a strategy for survival more closely aligned with Henry Louis Gates understanding of guile, than it is to do with European romanticism or a spiritual noble savage.33
Divided into historical moments Black Magic is a series of essays that range chronologically from the ancient civilization of Egypt through to the contemporary manifestations of Rastafari. At its heart is Rastafari’s belief in the divinity of the Black man. It tracks the geneology of this idea as it reconfigured and asserted itself in the face of the West’s superstitions and frailties. Each moment hinges on a different aspect of blackness in art history from the pharaoh’s of Egypt; the satyrs of Greece; the goat-man Baphomet; the masonic mysteries of the Caribbean; the salon nudes and ‘gris gris’ of Paris’ avant-garde, to the exotic photographs of Haile Selassie. Black culture’s response to these images whether in the form of fetishes, virgin cults, and New World spiritualisms are integral to the analysis offered in each essay as a way of understanding how a black eschatology was kept alive through the centuries. Mysticism and superstitions, freemason and rastafari afrocentrist philosophy provide sources for Black Magic’s methodology and a theoretical approach that holds together the threads of its overarching narrative.
Rastafari has grown from Jamaican minority cult status transcending its pan-African roots to embrace international youth culture. Western society’s perception of the movement has also shifted significantly. Initially considered anti-social, subversive and antagonistic towards white society, today Rastafari is increasingly viewed as pacifist and universal in its principles. Black Magic explores its basic tenets rooted in narratives of ancient civilization, biblical interpretation, political and philosophical thought to suggest how perceptions of black culture are historically fluid and subject to western notions of itself, its need for validation and appropriation.
Black Magic examines the images and imaginary of Rastafari to show how it has reconfigured itself to meet the needs of a changing world at once apprehensive but also charmed by black culture. If European black magic called upon evil spirits or the Devil to counter fear, then its obverse in Rastafari is the recognition of how to use that awe as a form of empowerment. Like the sinister superstitions that empowered African fetish objects, the fear is not inherent in the object but in the response it provokes. One phenomenon stands in direct relationship to the other, and black magic in its African or diasporic sense could not have had any meaning, value or efficacy outside of its relationship to western culture.
Black Magic is similar, representing a process of empowerment rather than a mystical experience. Its magic is that it focuses on those European superstitions that have been appropriated by black people, and that now allow them space to live in a different frame of reality. As a theoretical tool, I offer that space as a thinking place to explore shared fears and anxieties about race. I want to open up a discussion about what blackness and black people signify at the deepest level of white representation, and at the same time explore black magic as a modus operandi for black people. I want to ask that black people historically over-shadowed by those painful representations, acknowledge their defining presence in that relationship and use this power consciously to reclaim their history. I think it is time that we discard our ‘black skin, white masks’ and instead embrace and liberate our black arts/black hearts so that they can be better defined and manifested. 34
Of course such a declaration will be met with alarm by those who shy from racial rehashing and prefer to view the world in global terms that are forward looking and pluralistic. In post modern scholarship, the need to look backwards may seem like an unnecessary detour, especially when it considers issues such as slavery, segregation, apartheid, black separatism, racism and other historical and social realities many of us would prefer to forget. But, I would suggest that this is the culture work that has still not been done, on either side of the racial divide, and there can be no way of fast-tracking global culture until this task is accomplished.
As painful as this process of re-appraisal might be, I am optimistic that it is one of reclamation. That Black Magic like a search for gold, is an alchemical process that gives black people and their history greater visibility. Out of the dessert, dust and rock stones of our past, and beyond the dispelling of our hocus pocus superstitions and our existential questioning, there is a way of bringing something into being that is more whole, more just, and more transparent, and as a result.